


Lost & Found

by UrbanAmazon



Category: Bourne Legacy (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:54:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I was kind of hoping we were lost." -- Marta's words come back to haunt them both, as innocent words often do.  Marta and Aaron try to shift gears from fight and flight into something resembling a life together.  Unfortunately, there's not any transition program for fugitives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost & Found

**Author's Note:**

  * For [florahart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/gifts).



> "So basically, I want Aaron Cross to be happy."
> 
> Oh, you and me both. Those two are a tangle of complicated feelings and situations, and trying to put them in a happy, lasting ending was a tricky thing. I hope I've created something that makes their partnership and relationship sing for you.

Her words come back to haunt them both, like innocent words often do.

\--

On the boat, as he heals, Marta begins to teach Aaron how he ticks.  On the back of a napkin or in a rare notebook (that Marta always burns afterward), she sketches out the form of the delivery virus living in his blood.  She teaches Aaron about the neocortex and Brodmann areas of the brain, the frontal and the parietal lobes, the cerebellum and the brainstem, and what the chemical alterations did to each one.  Hormones and enzymes.  Metabolism, nerve conduction, and cellular generation.  She shares the math, the numbers that were once her life, and watches Aaron take it all in.  She gives him as best an instruction manual as she can offer, and she wonders if he understands the gravity of her lessons.  

No one else ever will.  Ever.  Forget publication, forget research - every other Outcome agent is dead, and her fellow pioneers in biochemistry are in the ground, too.  Aaron Cross is the only proof that Marta Shearing ever existed, ever did anything with her life and her brilliant mind, once upon a time.  She stays for more reasons than that one, but Marta would be lying to deny that it’s there.  

(She has nightmares about golems, once or twice.)

The scribbles of ink on paper are a self-fulfilling prophecy, a feedback loop.  Without her work, he couldn’t grasp the concepts behind her lessons, wouldn’t be able to use them (he tests lung capacity in the ocean and in the bath, logic problems in three languages, and turns into a sudoku fiend).  He enjoys learning, utterly glows with it.  Marta’s chest loses a bit of its tightness the first time he calls her ‘Teach’ instead of ‘Doc’, and he always says it with smile.  It makes her feel like a human being instead of a fugitive.      

Aaron teaches her how to survive - all the tricks until they become like habit, and then like breath.

Their code for alarm is ‘5’ (always the numeral, not the word).  Whenever they get a new set of cell phones, Aaron takes two minutes to pre-program them.  “Just hold down ‘5’ on the keypad,” he instructs.  “Like speed-dialing.  It’ll send the text straight to mine.”  If they can’t text each other, can’t speak, then it’s two fingers as a Roman numeral V.  It means disengage, run, and rendezvous.

Aaron teaches her all three of those, too.    

“Eyes,” he tells her, guiding her hand with his fingers.  “Throat.  Floating rib… feel it there?  Femoral artery.”  She does not blush, not for this.  “Knee.  Ankle.”  He presses a ballpoint pen into her grip (two of them holding her hair up in a bun, harmless-looking) and shows her where to aim, where to gouge, where to stomp so an attacker will be hobbled while she gets away.  She already knows how to run (“Hurdles in high school and university,” she insists, “not that anyone in the lab believed me.”), but he demonstrates how to evade at a walking pace, how to memorize maps and read traffic flow on a sidewalk.  Every city is a lesson in city planning and development, and even the tiniest of towns have points of safety.

She wonders, at first, if he teaches her all of this for reasons similar to her own.  She wonders if he’s preparing her to be alone, but neither of them talk about it.  They just don’t.  Hand in hand, brains and brawn, they fade into the background noise of the wide, wide world with nothing more than the sheer determination to stay alive, and leave nothing at all that might turn into a lead.

And then… nothing follows them.

Weeks pass like the miles under their feet, months pass like borders on a map.  Aaron guides them southwest through Malaysia, then north to Thailand, then west again.  They move by boat, until Marta knows a boat engine as well as a red blood cell (“You always get a grease stain, right here,” Aaron says, and he swipes his finger over her left eyebrow).  They move by foot, until Aaron’s shoes fall apart and they have to haggle furiously with a Canadian tourist at the next bus stop (“You didn’t know Canadians can be assholes, too?” Marta poked him in the ribs with her elbow. “I thought you travelled a lot.”).  They move by bus and by taxi and every now and then they rent a car (Marta lifts her head and feels the seam of Aaron’s pocket imprinted on her cheek, and her shoulder is warm from the infinite stroking of Aaron’s thumb, back and forth).  

No one comes for them.  Aaron never recognizes the body language of a fellow agent on the hunt, never tells Marta to walk away and never look back.  The alarm code goes unused.  

Forgive and forget is unlikely.  Out of sight and out of mind… maybe.  Maybe Aaron's that good at hiding them.  Maybe something changed hands.  They’re never sure.  

Aaron’s forty thousand dollars is helpful, but it is not omnipotent.  There are places on a map that don’t care for foreign money, and there are others where converting it would draw too much attention, so Aaron works hard labour jobs here and there, and Marta helps in hostel kitchens, but not for longer than a week.  No matter how often it feels like it could be (home) safe, they leave.  They always leave.

In Johannesburg cafe, a newspaper bears an almost-buried article about the latest American political scandal - spending habits, unallocated money, and investigations by the NSA.  None of the names are familiar to Marta’s recollection, but it makes her pause.  “Do you think we’re safe?” Marta asks.  Part of her wonders if what would happen if he says ‘yes’.  

(She has nightmares, once or twice, that the moment she walks away, Aaron will stop existing, like she’d dreamed him up and given him form.  She wonders if he thinks the same but they don’t talk about that, either.  They just stay close enough to confirm they’re both alive, and sleep in separate beds.)

“I don’t know yet,” Aaron answers honestly, so it’s a moot point.  He shifts in his seat to fold the newspaper away, and his shoe brushes Marta’s ankle under the table.

They stay two more days before some unspoken deadline ticks by, and something in the air is suddenly wrong - not hostile, just wrong.  They leave.

There’s a terrible car wreck eleven blocks from their apartment in Mombasa.  Sirens light up the street, and Aaron stands by their window, gun close but not in his hand, not yet.  He’s tense as a statue, like a dog in a cage.  He’s angry, but his eyebrows are tilted up with despair.  After the first hour, Marta finds his tell; it’s not the police cars that make his mouth tighten.  It’s the ambulances.  

Marta drags a chair over to his side and touches his wrist.  He turns the gun away and holds her hand until the sun rises and everything’s quiet again.  

They keep moving north, past farmers and students, past businessmen and shopkeepers, past taxi drivers and fishermen, past… past everyone.  Families.  Children.  Homes, with roots in the ground and photographs on walls.  They move through identities and aliases.  They move until a vendor asks a question when they buy bottled water from his stand in Parque del Retiro.  “So where’s home for you two?  What do you do with your lives when you’re not travelling?”  They have a cover story (they always have a cover story), but before either of them can give it, the vendor’s grandfatherly eye twinkles.  “No, no… let me guess.  I’m very good at guessing.  You, sweet lady… I think you are an artist.  A painter, yes?  I can tell by your hands.”

Marta’s never painted anything other than a renovated wall, and she’d hated every stroke.  

“And you, sir… I am guessing you are a firefighter.  My nephew is a firefighter, you know?  Always helping people.”

Marta catches the hesitation in Aaron’s face as something, some feeling gets in the way of his usually effortless lie.  It passes, and Aaron calls the vendor a mind-reader as he pays for the water.  They leave.

Instead of sleeping that night, Marta finds herself staring up at the ceiling decorated with old maps, artistically stained and weathered like parchment, and realizes it’s been a year since that night on a knife’s edge in Manila.  She slips out of the rented room’s bed, goes to the bathroom and stares at the ghost the mirror offers back.  

(“Do you want to live?”)

Hair, cut and dyed a half-dozen times.  The mark on her nose from (fake) glasses.  The fading layers of sun exposure on her skin, and a few freckles she’d never seen after days of working in the lab.   She sees the muscles in her arms and shoulders, and the recovered inch of height she’d lost staring down a microscope.  Does she look like a painter?  She tries to remember what it feels like to stand still, to be herself instead of a cover, and she… she can’t.

When she doesn’t go back, Aaron gets up from the bed he’d made on the floor.  Marta tries not to notice the way the bathroom light makes his perfect face look so tired, or how the scene is soaked in deja vu.

(“Who was June Monroe?”

“You are.”

“Did you know her?”  

“Not anymore.”)

Marta’s fingers gravitate to Aaron’s hand when he places it on her shoulder.  The gesture should ground them like it always does, but this time it fails.  “What are we doing?” she asks softly.  “What are we?  What are we supposed to do with… with this?”

Aaron’s never lied to her, but Marta can read the wish in his eyes.  “I don’t know.”

“Did they train you to live like this?  To be… are you happy?  Away from them?”  Marta knows, now, that Outcome agents never had a retirement plan waiting for them.  They never had contingencies for old age, counselling, or honourable discharge.  Any friends they had, any family - it was for a job, for a cover.  

What does that make her?  What did she want it to make?

“You know… no one ever asked me that question.  Not once.  It was always about pride, about doing what was needed for our country.  I think everyone just assumed that being happy, it wasn’t a factor for us.  We followed orders, and that was good enough.”  

“Put aside all emotional responses, right?”

“Not all of ‘em.  Not all the time.”  Aaron’s voice is very soft.  His thumb rubs over hers, back and forth.  “Not in our batch, anyway.”

“Are you happy?”  She turns away from the mirror, faces him down.  

Aaron’s eyes close and his fingers tense like she’s going to slip away from him.  “If I say no, can I stay-”

“I’m not leaving you... but can’t we be happy, Aaron?  Can’t we-”

Like he’s defying some last, lingering rule, Aaron kisses her until the both of them are shaking.  Marta frames his face with her hands like she could block out the whole world, like she’s hooding a falcon, and he lifts her effortlessly to the bed.  

They hold each other on the floor afterward, sheets and blankets thrown off for sticking to their sweaty skin.  They hold each other too tightly, because there’s nothing else to hold, and they know it.  

There’s no other word for it; they’re lost.

\--

The only way out is through.  In the hotel room in Madrid, they talk.  For the first time in a year, they talk about living, not just surviving, and all the things they left behind, as if they were people again.  

“When I was in sixth grade, my sister got sick with meningitis.  I was young enough to be terrified out of my mind that she was going to die, but old enough to try to make sense of it with books.  I think that’s when I knew I was going to grow up into a doctor.  First I wanted to be a pediatrician.  I could never shake that idea of helping kids that were as scared as I was.  I took biology, then chemistry in high school and… things just shifted a little.  Instead of medicine, it seemed to make more sense in looking at problems at cellular levels.  It seemed to make more sense to fix problems before they could start.  Before anyone was hurt.”

It hurts, saying it out loud.  It hurts, thinking of Aaron’s long-lost photograph on a fallen heroes website, as something that needed fixing.  Marta’s face burns with shame.  “And then when I was hired at the lab, I stopped… I stopped seeing what I did as helping people.  It was all cells and enzymes.  It was-”

“Science,” Aaron finishes when her throat gets too tight to continue, and his voice has lost all condemnation.  “Yeah.  I know.  Like objectives.”

Marta sniffles, breathing carefully through her nose to calm her aching head.  “I miss it.  I… I miss books, and eye strain, and seeing cells react under a scope.  I miss… I miss lab results.  Tissue collection.  How horrible is that?”  She doesn’t say that she misses her sister (Her sister is alive because Marta doesn’t miss her).  “But how can I even think about missing that?  After what happened?”

“You’re not horrible, Marta.”  Aaron kisses her forehead.  “You’re not.  You don’t have to go back to that.”

(She only needs sixty seconds in a pharmacy in Phnom Penh to know she’s not ready to go back to working with white walls, sterilized tools, and bright, uncaring lights.  Not yet.  Maybe not ever.  Maybe it’s best).  

Marta calms. The night is cooling (it’s better that they’re cold, better that they don’t feel like they’re both burning with fever) and she pulls a corner of the discarded sheets over the both of them.  “Why did you want to become a soldier in the first place?  Do you remember?”

Aaron’s brow furrows, like he has to think through scar tissue or reluctance for the answer.  He stares up at the ceiling maps, past them.  Words and symbols skitter automatically into his head, stored for later recall.  “Kinda like you, maybe.  I wanted to help people.  Defend them.  I understood that much.  There were these photos at the… the place where I lived - a half-dozen of the kids had enlisted after they aged out.  They were just kids, but the counselors always mentioned them like they’d done the best possible thing anyone could do with their lives.  I knew I wasn’t ever going to be a doctor, or a teacher, or anything like that, but I never liked seeing other people get hurt.”  Aaron sniffs and readjusts his fingers, curling them in her hair.  “Instead, people got killed.”

When Marta closes her eyes, she sees the three security guards in Manila, motionless on the floor with pebbles of shattered glass all around them.  She sees the body of the agent on the motorcycle spinning and crumpling into a smear.  She leans into Aaron’s chest all the same.  “You helped me.”

“No, before that.  Before you.  In some of the… missions I did, people got killed.  People that didn’t have to.  Bad intelligence.  I got slapped down for questioning it, once.”

“For getting people killed?”

“No.  For giving a damn.  For letting it get to me.”  Aaron rubbed at his brow.   “It wasn’t part of Outcome parameters.  It wasn’t part of my… purpose.”  There’s a word he almost lets out, his mouth forms the beginning of a harsh, cruel ‘s’... but he stops, and lets it die in the quiet room.

“Aaron?”

“Yeah?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to make you proud.  I… you did something right, Marta.  I know it but I don’t think you know it.  I want to make you proud of what you’ve done for me.”  There’s a ferocity in the way he says it, and Marta almost hears the word ‘Teach’ at the end.  It makes her feel hope.

Marta looks at their fingers, intertwined.  “I want us to feel human again.”

\--

They do it carefully, because by now there is no other way they know.  There’s no other way they’re going to trust that it’s real, that it’ll last.  It’s worth years of planning, years of making sure, because the fear never completely goes away, and now they have something to lose (instead of just their lives), together.

Aaron helps her create a strong enough identity to enroll in an online university course (“Art History and Museum Studies?” he asks, in that deadpan tone that edges on a grin).  It’s a disaster.  She loathes the instructor’s teaching style and while she can pin down artist names with ease, the eras and dates and movements refuse to stick.  She gets a final grade of C+.  

Staring at a mark she hasn’t seen since seventh grade, Marta feels a weird giddiness.  Aaron’s strong hands steady her shoulders, and she feels like she’s being reborn, starting again.  

Piece by piece, cell by cell.  Marta watches Aaron make a friend as they work at an orchard in Italy, picking olives for four long weeks.  Aaron and the woman talk about skin-diving.  Marta can tell, by now, when Aaron’s faking it, when he’s spinning a story with such ease that no normal person could tell the difference.  He carefully, guardedly shifts the topic to arctic diving (“Why in god’s name would you do something like that?” and Aaron answers, “Because I could.”), and it’s real.  It’s another piece of Outcome’s mask falling away to show a man with a hobby.  At the end of the season, the woman - Lise - shakes Aaron’s hand, then Marta’s, and promises to write.  

A friend here.  A souvenir there.  They keep moving, but stay longer.  He never stops reading newspapers and online reports, eyes sharp for double-speak, and she can never completely quell her habit of doodling chemical compounds on cafe napkins (she burns them, always burns them).   

Marta helps Aaron make a resume for the first time in his life, and both of them agree that it feels like the weirdest thing they’ve ever done.  

They’re in Pamplona in July.  The sounds of the bulls approaching makes Aaron turn to Marta and he arches an eyebrow in challenge.  “Don’t you dare!” she laughs, really laughs, but he’s already half-over the balcony railing and she has to kiss him to keep him from dropping down into the street for the sheer adrenaline of it.  Someone snaps a picture that appears in a local paper, but Marta’s hair, long and dark, falls forward to hide their faces.  

(She has a dream about that first beach, when there was still a bandage around Aaron’s shoulder, and he’s drawing a golden spiral into the sand like he’s circling them home.)

The storm hits on the last day of May, spraying cold and snow off the edge of a cyclone further out to sea.  The wind through the trees sounds like crashing ocean waves, and the snow falls wet and horizontal.  Aaron’s LandSAR Alpine Cliff Rescue radio crackles and he’s packed and prepped  in two minutes flat (keep a go-bag, always, it’s like breathing).     

“Someone’s lost?”  Marta still wakes up as quickly as he does, like a knife clearing a sheath, but the urgency in his hands calms as he runs his fingers through her hair.  

“Mountaineering tour.  Somewhere in the Northland region.  They need ice climbers.”

“Then they need you.  Be careful.”

There’s no time for elaborate goodbyes.  Marta watches his eyes take quick inventory of their house (open floor plan, clear line of sight to all points of entry, her own go-bag at the foot of their bed) before giving her that smile that comes so much easier after so much practice.  “Always.”

Their cabin is in the thick trees north of Albany (funny coincidence, Albany in New Zealand instead of New England). The day is long, and quiet but for the wind.  Sometimes she can go for a week without seeing AJ Monroe come back through the door, but the cell phone at her hip stays quiet, so she can wait.  She stays busy.   

Alone, she makes breakfast in the cabin, feeds the dogs outside, and logs into her university laptop to read her students’ papers.  It’s kinesiology now (the BSci/BEd and MSci parchments for June M. Monroe hang in frames over the fireplace, earned the old fashioned way), and upgrading classes in fundamental biology and chemistry.  Maybe one of her students will take an interest in biochemistry and genetics all on their own, but that glow of pride gets brighter with every passing term, every successful graduation.  She looks in the mirror and can meet her own eyes.  She sleeps, and she doesn’t dream.      

Marta jumps awake when the door opens in the middle of the night, still quick as a knife, but the dogs aren’t barking and the lights are on.  

Aaron’s arms around her are so tight, and her skin tingles with the lingering cold on his clothes.  Snowflakes caught in his beard melt against her jawline.  There’s a bit of matching gray in their hair, now that they haven’t dyed it in so long.  

“You did good.”  She knows it.  She can read it in his arms when a rescue is successful, whether he shakes or stays stone quiet for hours.  Marta reads it now has he pulls back and kisses her brow.  There’s a lightness to his expression, under the chapped red of wind burn and the flecks of ice and mud caught in the lines about his eyes.  “You did good.”  

“Thank you,” he tells her, and this time Marta doesn’t have a needle in her hand.   It’s the same expression on his face, the same smile with such honesty as to make her chest hurt, and his hands on hers are warm.  Marta’s never felt more home.


End file.
